One of the most substantial recent changes in public company accounting is ASC 606: Revenues from Contracts with Customers. The changes affect a wide range of public filers, from SaaS companies to real estate managers, to fast food franchisors. This post will focus on what analysts can do to efficiently see what has changed in their coverage universe. For the accounting enthusiasts who want to know more about the changes themselves, we recommend KPMG’s 1,100-page implementation guide.

As the implementations have been rolling in the filers’ SEC filings, we find that two Doc Searches can help analysts find the adjustments provided by the companies.

For income statement changes, we use IN:TABLE search for revenue within 200 words of “606.” In Sentieo, analysts can search specific company documents, docs from several companies (tickers entered manually or in a saved watchlist), or general search (which can be modified by factors such as market cap, headquarters location, specific filing forms, sector, and many others).

For balance sheet changes, we use IN:TABLE search for equity, within 200 words of 606.

Using these searches enabled us to find what we need, in a fraction of the time that older search methods require. Here are some of our findings.

Intuit (INTU), parent of QuickBooks and TurboTax, went from a loss to almost break-even in its third quarter under the new standard.

SaaS company AutoDesk (ADSK): we see that both revenues and the closely watched ARR numbers are affected.

Commercial real estate broker and manager Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) saw several changes in its balance sheet, notably the creation of several new line items related to the adoption of 606.

SVB Financial (SIVB), parent of Silicon Valley Bank, also reported major changes in its accounts receivable and its deferred revenues on its balance sheet.

Finally, telecom Sprint Corporation (S) saw balance sheet adjustments in a few categories, including the addition of $1.2 billion of customer contract acquisitions on the Assets side, and a $1.3 billion swing from negative accumulated earnings to positive.

If you’d like to learn more about how using Sentieo can help your process, get in touch.

There are several approaches used in forecasting financial metrics for publicly traded businesses. In this post, we will focus on revenue forecasting for businesses that provide “unit-based” metrics.

What are unit-based metrics? Broadly speaking, these are the fundamental revenue-generating blocks of the businesses. We see them reported in different forms. For example, in retail and restaurants, the units are the actual physical locations. We also see unit-level metrics in subscription-based businesses from movie streaming giant Netflix (and the widely followed “subs” number) to home alarm company ADT to SAAS companies (where reported unit-based metrics include customer acquisitions costs, CAC, and churn.)

We will look at one example to illustrate our approach.

Let’s take restaurant chain Chipotle. Deriving a revenue forecast for the full year next year is relatively simple: we need to know the number of restaurants that the company will have “mid-year” (since we assume no seasonality in openings), the current average revenue per store (a number that is either provided or can be derived), and a certain level of “comparable sales” growth, generally in-line with current trends. Usually management will provide their annual guidance when they report Q4 but, until then, we can have a reasonable estimate.

In the last 8-K with the Q3 results that Chipotle filed, we find the following information:

Chipotle started the year with 2,408 units and expects that it will end the year “at the lower end” of the 2018 guidance range, or, about 130 extra units. We also see that about half were opened by Q2, indicating no seasonality. Our conservative estimate for 2018 year-end units is 2,538.

For 2019 then, since we have the guidance already, we can take the midpoint of the 140-155 guide, or 148 units. This will leave us with a year-end 2019 forecast of 2,538+148=2,686 units.

However, remember that this is the year-end number: not all of these restaurants will be generating full-year revenues, so for our annual 2019 revenue forecast, we will take half the growth, or 74 units. Our “mid-year” forecast for units is now 2,538+74=2,612 units.

We also need to know how much revenue each unit is generating, also known as AUV. Chipotle does provide this number: we can see that for the last quarter, the LTM number is $1.98 mm.

However, the AUV number is not static: Chipotle, and many other restaurants and retailers, provide a “comparable store sales” growth number every quarter. While there is no set industry standard, this number is usually derived from units that have been open for at least a year. We can see that last quarter the number was +4.4%, but also that the number has moved up and down quite a bit historically as the company recovered from its food safety issues, as we can see in Sentieo’s Plotter of this particular KPI.

We can set a range of 2% to 5% for 2019, and now we have all the assumptions that we need.

They are 2,612 units selling $1.98 mm on average, times 2% to 5%. Our revenue range estimate for Chipotle then is 2,612 x $1.98 mm x 1.02 = $5,275 mm on the low end. Our high end estimate is $5,430 mm. We can see that this is not far from the current Street estimate for Chipotle’s 2019 revenues, as listed in Sentieo’s Equity Data Terminal.

What will make a real difference here is knowing whether the unit openings will be front-loaded, even, or back-loaded, as well as current comparable sales growth trends. We might not get additional clarity on that until the report. However, we can try to estimate the real-time comparable sales trend using Sentieo’s Mosaic alternative data composite index, which shows strong current KPI trend so we are comfortable being above the Street estimate.

The desire for a more powerful document search and the need for document tagging and annotation abilities were the primary reasons that the RGA team wanted to switch to Sentieo.

Prior to Sentieo, they were using Bloomberg. They have since removed a Bloomberg license, as Sentieo has rendered it redundant.

“Nothing else on the market came close to offering us a streamlined and collaborative platform for reviewing and annotating company documents and transcripts. We were intrigued by Sentieo’s impressive capability to pull as-reported data into Excel. A web-native, cloud platform was a big plus.” – Jason Gilbert, RGA Investment Advisors

Jason wakes up around 5:30 am and starts the day reading through a vast array of morning digest emails and the WSJ via his iPad. Afterward, he logs into Sentieo to check his followed tickers and peruse any news that he may have missed. During earnings season, he’ll generally spend more time in Sentieo Document Search looking through earnings transcripts. If he sees that Elliot has already annotated a given transcript, he’ll generally access it through the Sentieo Notebook and use Elliot’s highlights as a guide.

For Elliot, no two days are alike, but he almost always starts by catching up on news in the morning:

“I have Sentieo email alerts setup for every stock in our portfolio and for our primary watchlist…That gives me something to look through every day before moving onto my primary research objectives.”

When screening for ideas or after being recently introduced to a stock, Elliot reads the most recent filings and 10-K, highlighting and annotating along the way. He runs document searches for key terms of interest and gathers some historical context. When building models, he uses Sentieo to extract tables directly from the 10-Q and 10-Ks. Like Jason’s, a good chunk of Elliot’s day is spent reading and marking up transcripts in Sentieo during earnings season and conference season. Jason and Elliot find themselves using Sentieo’s Document Search, Notebook, Watchlists, Alerts, and Equity Data Terminal the most frequently throughout their workdays.

Document Search and Excel Modeling

Elliot’s favorite feature is Document Search because it’s “so simple and easy to use and invaluable in numerous contexts.” Document Search and the Notebook are “without a doubt” Jason’s favorite features. They both run keyword searches multiple times a day.

Watchlists, Alerts, and Redlining

Elliot’s favorite feature is Document Search because it’s “so simple and easy to use and invaluable in numerous contexts.” Document Search and the Notebook are “without a doubt” Jason’s favorite features.

They both run keyword searches multiple times a day.

The team uses watchlists to track the companies tickers that interest them, opting into “crucial” email alerts for new documents and price news. They also heavily use Sentieo’s redlining comparison tool regularly during big filing seasons, and especially on 10-K’s.

The Notebook (Research Management System)

Jason and Elliot use the team note-sharing and collaboration features within the Notebook to share ideas and keep each other up-to-date. Elliot’s second favorite Sentieo feature is highlighting because “it’s fantastic to have all my markings stored in one place, neatly.” They both use document highlighting and annotation tools multiple times a day.

Equity Data Terminal

“It’s amazing how much cleaner this data is presented in Sentieo versus in Bloomberg. It was easy to overcome my inertia here.” -Jason Gilbert, RGA Investment Advisors

Jason uses the Sentieo Equity Data Terminal multiple times a day to check company summary pages, which display everything from the company description to valuation and price targets, historical charts, estimates, and much more.

“My biggest time savings come from having neat sorting and access to information in the Sentieo equity data terminal, and from easy recall of key things that I may have noted through the Sentieo Notebook.” – Elliot Turner, RGA Investment Advisors

Mobile

Jason uses the iPhone app often, mainly for staying updated on his followed tickers.

A picture is worth a thousand words — or maybe around $2 bn (which happens to be CAKE’s market cap). Three of Sentieo’s core functions are table extraction, plotting and record management. In this blog post, we demonstrate how analysts use these convenient functions to visualize a company’s financials in minutes.

CAKE, like many other restaurant companies, reports its Income Statement in a non-standard format: there is no all-encompassing COGS. Instead, we see different line items with different cost buckets, such as food costs, labor costs, and occupancy costs. In its earnings release 8-K, CAKE also calculates each of these line items as a percentage of sales.

Using Sentieo’s Time Series Function, we will build a time series containing the major operational line items: food costs, labor costs, and “other” operating expenses.

After the extraction, we can review the numbers by document by clicking ”Next’ (always check to see if the numbers are a 6-9-12 month summation, or just the Q4 is a 12-month. See the boxes in the lower left that help the adjustments). From here, one can open the source document, export to Excel, or open in the Plotter charting engine — after checking the numbers. For companies that change formats, you can enter the correct number in the columns on the left field. We do this here for Q1 and Q2 2015 as the numbers appear without a “%” signs.

The corrected numbers for 2015 look like this:

After we have made sure that the numbers look good (all are coming from quarterly columns, all are in the same percentage format), we open the data in Plotter.

Since all numbers are given as a percentage of sales, we can merge the Y-axes from the chart settings.

To get a better idea for the underlying cost trends, we are muting the quarterly numbers for each series, and adding a 4-quarter moving average. We can also customize colors, line format and line thickness.

Here we can see the longer term trends. While food and occupancy costs have stayed relatively steady (as a percent of sales), we can see that labor expenses have been moving up.

We are now ready to save, tag, and share the chart with the team.

The chart is now a part of our CAKE Notes, and can be commented on, added to full theses, or to other Notes inside Sentieo’s Notes Records Management System.

We recently introduced an enhancement to our document markup functionality: Sentieo Capture.Within documents in Sentieo, you’ve had the ability to highlight, annotate, and tag your colleagues within important passages of text. Oftentimes, you’ve also come across important graphics such as charts or tables that you may have wanted to collect and save.

With Sentieo Capture, you can now:

Capture any portion of a document (such as a capex breakout slide from a company’s investor presentation).

Mark up the capture with shapes, arrows, and lines of text.

Save the captured area as an image (along with the source document) directly into your Notebook.

As with highlights, you can also add label(s) and annotations to your captures.

Why Should I Use Sentieo Capture?

While performing a deep dive analysis on a company, investment professionals are likely to face information overload, which can make it challenging to effectively manage all the information being consumed. Ultimately, effectively managing information and data becomes one of the key skills of a successful investment professional:

How do you collect information snippets from the documents you are reading, and then create a summary report?

How do you record the link (URL) to remember the source of the document along with your information snippet?

How do you organize the information you’ve collected so that you can easily retrieve it at a later time?

When collaborating with others on your team, how do you efficiently share and update this information?

You have probably used various tools to tackle these questions, including the Windows Snipping Tool, MS Outlook, MS Word, MS OneNote and Evernote. These are all great tools and have their own particular strengths, but they do not solve the a major problem in the investment professionals’ information capture flow: having to source, organize, remember, and be able to retrieve your research.

At Sentieo, we are building features to replace the fragmented information capture workflow to become a one-stop solution for managing, sharing, and retrieving the information you’ve gathered on a company or topic. That way you can come up with a meaningful conclusion using all of the information you’ve gathered, and not just bits and pieces. In this post, we’ll nudge you into trying a slightly different approach when doing your company research in Sentieo.

How Do I Use It?

The Capture feature can be triggered via the photograph icon located in the upper-right corner of the document that you are viewing. There is no real setup required other than making sure that you have installed the Sentieo Chrome extension, which you will be prompted to do if it is not already installed.

To enable capture mode, simply click the “Capture” button on the toolbar while viewing any document within Document Search or your Notebook:

Begin your capture by selecting the area you would like to capture and clicking and dragging:

A new screen with your captured area will appear, allowing you to:

Name your capture

Mark up your capture with the annotation tools menu

Copy to clipboard, e-mail out, or save the image to your computer

Add a label or annotation to your capture

Save or discard your capture

Where is this information being stored, and what can I do with it?

All of your bookmarks, highlights, annotations (and now captures) are also stored and searchable within your Sentieo Notebook. This also means that your information is available from any computer with Google Chrome and an internet connection.

Like highlights, all of your captures are automatically sent to your Notebook and populated with the source document title and filing date, any relevant company tickers, and any labels and annotations. This automatic tagging makes retrieving your highlights and captures a breeze in the future.

Additionally, you can share selected research with the rest of your team and people outside of Sentieo. You can also view what others have shared with you.

We hope that Sentieo Capture saves you more time and keeps your research more organized. Give highlighting and Capture a try; you won’t want to do your Sentieo research without it! Please message us via customer support chat, or email nauman@sentieo.com with any feedback on the functionality that you would like to see added to the new capture feature! Haven’t used Sentieo yet? Get a free trial.

By Alap Shah, CEO @ Sentieo: On behalf of the entire Sentieo team, I’m proud to announce that Sentieo has secured $19 million in Series A funding. We are thrilled to have Centana Growth Partners leading the round, and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Eric Byunn to our board of directors.

This milestone caps 18 months of accelerating momentum at Sentieo, driving a tripling of our client base to 700, a doubling of our global headcount to 160 and the release of the Sentieo Notebook / RMS (Research Management System) for collaboration. While we’re certainly celebrating today’s milestone, fundraising is merely a means to our ultimate end- accelerating human productivity and collaboration in the financial space.

We’ve come a long way from our earliest days, when my brother Naman and I began building tools to improve my own research productivity in running our family office portfolio. Working with our early engineering team, I remember being struck by the huge and immediate performance boost I experienced when I was delivered search and analytics software that was custom built for my workflow. This new capital will help accelerate our R&D spend and go-to-market strategy to help us deliver this same productivity boost to more financial decision makers globally.

The pace of change continues to accelerate in the financial industry, with increased regulation, continued shifts to passive and quant strategies and shrinking trading commissions / fee pools. In our experience, the most important underlying change is the relentless explosion in data available to inform decisions. Beginning with the internet and accelerating with mobile, cloud and now AI, data is multiplying, together with the opportunity for insight. There is a prevailing narrative across industries including finance that algorithms are best equipped to generate this insight, translating to a growing loss of human jobs.

We see things a bit differently from our unique vantage point. AI and related technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) are best at performing repetitive, trainable processes. In our world we use AI and NLP to help researchers take away the monotonous work of extracting financial data from tables, finding key management commentary in a transcript or alerting a user to changes in a company’s risk factors disclosures. Using our tools, analysts can drastically increase their speed and coverage without sacrificing the depth and accuracy of their work, freeing them up for more meaningful work that only humans can do. Getting out from behind their desks, researchers can visit more management teams, attend more industry conferences and spend time cultivating unique data sources to develop differentiated viewpoints on markets and industries.

Finally, as the stakes go up and the number of data inputs increase, finance continues to become more of a team sport. Our work with increasingly matrixed organizations with diffuse knowledge and skill sets has underscored the unique challenges in bringing an organization’s best thinking to bear in driving decisions. This institutional knowledge management and collaboration function is a uniquely human act that can’t be matched by machines. Sentieo’s Notebook / RMS is custom designed to enable humans and software to work seamlessly, automating knowledge sharing, cataloguing decision points, leaving a clear audit trail and allowing concise measurement of outcomes. The results are clear- better visibility, accountability and performance.

To see how Sentieo can make you Superhuman, simply go to Sentieo.com and sign up for a free trial. If you would like to receive content related to topics of interest in the markets, don’t forget to subscribe to the Sentieo Blog so that we can notify you of new posts by email.

Not all contractual obligations that result in cash outflows are listed in a company’s balance sheet. Looking purely at debt figures leaves an incomplete picture of future funding needs. In this blog post, we will find and visualize these liabilities in several examples across industries. While most analysts are very familiar with common items like operating leases and post-retirement healthcare liabilities, here are a few other items that we found.

We compiled these using the search term “Contractual Obligations” in Sentieo’s Document Search, and then built a Time Series chart using the Sentieo Time Series function to export from the 10-K or 10-Q. Lastly, we displayed the data in Sentieo Plotter.

Netflix: The online streaming hegemon has over $18 billion in future content liabilities. That’s a lot of binge-watching! The number has been growing steadily every quarter. Public chart viewer: http://snt.io/3YEv9pLtK

Nike: The dominant athletic footwear and apparel maker is known for its high-profile athlete endorsements. But these contracts do not come cheap; Nike’s 10-Ks show a growing off-balance sheet liability, now at over $10 billion. Public chart viewer: http://snt.io/aeEv9rCv9

Waste Management: The leader in waste management has over $3 bn (and growing) in environmental-related liabilities around the closure of garbage facilities at the end of their useful lives. Public chart viewer: http://snt.io/rcEv9sR9C

Vulcan Materials is a large supplier of aggregates (like sand and crushed stone) to the construction industry. We plotted the mineral royalties that they expect to owe to the property owners of the sites that they operate. Public chart view link: http://snt.io/fNEv9srx4

Valero, a large oil/petrochemical refiner, has over $30 bn in purchase commitments, mostly crude oil. The numbers have stayed fairly steady over the last 10 years. Public chart viewer: http://snt.io/EgEv9vTXr

Finally, our favorite find: Deckers Outdoor Corporation. This parent company of the UGG brand has purchase commitments for (you guessed it!) over $100 million dollars of sheepskin. This is a new disclosure; only two 10-Ks have it, so we are not showing a bar chart.

Do you ever feel like Pumpkin Spice season seems to start earlier and earlier? Well, it’s true. It’s also bigger than ever — at least in Search.

Sentieo’s Mosaic pulled ten years of “pumpkin spice” search data, and we see some clear trends. Pumpkin spice season was typically off to a slow start, building up to a spike around Thanksgiving in late November (and we see the late November spikes on different days as Thanksgiving moves around).

We also see that over the last ten years, the pumpkin spice season has been starting earlier, and search volume in September/October has started to dwarf the previous peak around Thanksgiving. Finally, the pumpkin spice volume peaked in early September this year!

We are also seeing the term “pumpkin spice” appear across corporate communications: press releases, transcripts, and presentations. Using Sentieo’s thematic search, we looked for “pumpkin spice” across all corporate communications. We see a range of pumpkin spice products from Dunkin, Coca-Cola, IHOP, and even a pumpkin spice Baileys coffee liquor from Diageo.

And, of course, the 800-pound pumpkin spice gorilla is Starbucks: the company announced in a tweet that its legendary pumpkin spice latte is back on August 28th. Below, we used Sentieo’s Plotter to look at the frequency of pumpkin or PSL mentions from the Starbucks Twitter account.

A fairness opinion is a report, usually created by an investment bank, showing that a contemplated strategic transaction (such as a merger) is fair to the shareholders who are represented by the company’s Board of Directors. A fairness opinion will typically contain carefully researched and adjusted trading and transaction comparables.

Fairness opinions are used by buyside and sellside analysts to analyze transaction multiples and trends. They are used by activist investors who might feel that the target is undervalued and look to exercise their appraisal rights in court. In a similar fashion, securities litigation specialists might look at the documents while seeking compensation on behalf of shareholders. Finally, fairness opinions are looked at by corporate M&A/development professionals who monitor their own or adjacent industries.

Fairness opinions are usually rendered after the transaction has been announced, and they are filed with the SEC. However, a merger or an acquisition typically creates a deluge of filings from both parties, making locating this important document time-consuming, as there is no special SEC form for fairness opinions.

Sentieo users save time locating fairness opinions in seconds. Sentieo can also locate fairness opinions for companies that no longer trade. Here we show two examples: the pending deal between ConAgra Brands and Pinnacle Foods, and the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft from a few years ago.

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DISCLAIMER

Nothing on this website should be considered investment advice. We do not make recommendations (long or short) in any securities. We do not express opinions as to whether any company's accounting practices are in violation of SEC, GAAP, IFRS or other rules/regulations.